Unreasonable Histories
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introdUCtion : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : colonialism, nativism, and tHe GenealoGical imaGination : : On the eve of 1964, the British Central African Federation (1953–63) that had united Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland for ten years ended. By July 6, 1964, Nyasaland achieved its independence to become Malawi, with Zambia following suit on October 24, 1964. South- ern Rhodesia would pursue an entirely diﬀerent political path through the white- led Rhodesian Front’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence on November 11, 1965. A prolonged armed struggle would result, lasting until 1980 with the founding of Zimbabwe. However, the official collapse of the federation on December 31, 1963, virtually guaranteed eventual change across the region. British control and influence—even among Southern Rhodesia’s white community—would decline dramatically in a span of less than two years. To mark the occasion, a symbolic funeral procession took place on New Year’s Day, 1964, at the headquarters of the Malawi Congress Party (mcp) in Limbe, Nyasaland, with a coffin provocatively labeled “Fed- eration Corpse” burned as an effigy of imperial failure. Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1898–1997), leader of the mcp and future president of Malawi (ﬁgure i.1), prefaced this emblematic gesture with a short speech in which he affirmed, with pointed refrain, “Now at last, the Federation is dissolved, dissolved, dissolved.”1 In a similar spirit of disenchantment, Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia and leader of the United National Indepen- dence Party, commented several years later that the federation had been a doomed eﬀort to counter African nationalism, presenting “a brake upon African advancement in the North.” In his view, whites throughout the re- gion had been “blinding themselves to the signs writ large in the skies over post- war Africa,” a case of “shouting against the wind.”2 In these ways, the